Our Glasgow Raspberry Pi cloud system is an academic project, which means it will be a never-ending work-in-progress. In the past few days, we had lots of publicity (thanks (merci) guys!) so we want to give a quick status update so people know what we’ve done so far:
Hardware
We have 56 Pi boards in 4 Lego mini-racks. Sadly these are 256MB model B boards, not the newer 512MB version. We have 56 because each rack has a Top Of Rack Switch, which has 16 ethernet connections. We use 14 connections for the Pi boards, and the others for inter-switch connections.
Software Stack
We run Raspbian Linux on each Pi board. We have three LXC containers on each Pi, each running a Linux instance. There is no resource isolation or accounting yet, so we don’t make any guarantees about utilization for individual containers.
We have experimented with more adventurous technology, including libvirt (hacking this, but not yet got full RasPi support working) and docker (had discussions with the developers, watch this space).
Hosted Software
Within each container, we run simple workloads such as lighttpd. We also use artificial workloads like lookbusy for our experiments. We are currently working with Hadoop, although at present this is on the native Linux instance, rather than an LXC instance.
Management Layer
Our project student (Richard) built a nice AWS-like web management console for the Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud. Here are some screenshots.
If/when we get libvirt working, then we hope to be able to use standard tools like ovirt.
Edit (22 June 2013): The Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud is entirely distinct from PiCloud, as the PiCloud folks requested us to say…
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